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All finished apart from 14D which I'm having difficulty parsing:

Heavy defeat in round eight rankles initially (9)

B _ T _ E _ I _ G

I'm thinking it must be BATTERING but don't really understand why. Any suggestions?

Think in as in cricket, surrounding two initial letters

Batting, In
ER - the first letters (initially) of Eight and Rankles
Round = the ER goes inside the the Batting.

Thank you Malone / Quisling: a bit contorted the 'in = batting' part... but I guess I should have seen it nevertheless.

Bilbow, glad we could help. All the batting references - in, on, leg etc - get used far too often for my liking!